Hitchcock,thankfully, is not theLiz & Dick of great director
biopics. This behind-the-scenes look at the master of suspense might not be in
the league of something that Hitchcock would have made himself, although it
might be a step above Waltzes from Vienna,
but fans of Alfred Hitchcock will certainly enjoy the insider’s look at the
making of Psycho, as well as Anthony
Hopkins’ delightfully playful performance as the great director. Hitchcock, based on the book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho
by Stephen Rebello, uses this one period from Hitchcock’s career to explore all
his features and foibles. It’s a love story of sorts, but unlike Liz & Dick’s one-note bastardization
of a Hollywood icon, Hitchcock uses
the relationship between Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville (Helen Mirren) to
explore the man’s creative process, inner demons, and unsung partner-in-crime.

The making of Psycho
almost offers a rags-to-riches story for Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock opens as the director is coming off the success of North by Northwest, another spy thriller
that was met with rave reviews along with a few quibbles that Hitch had churned
out the same movie a few times before. Hitch echoes the sentiment himself,
grumbling to Alma that the studios want him to make the same picture again and
again. “Just give them a movie and be free,” Alma suggests when Hitch laments
that he is locked into a contract with Paramount and owes them one film. Very
much the woman-behind-the-man that so frequently appears in award season
biopics, Alma seems to be the common sense behind the Hitchcock name. She is
one half of the Hitchcock brain, at least, and the film gives Alma much credit
that popular culture rarely offered her before.

It’s on his own whim, however, that Hitch chooses Psycho as his next project. The novel by
Robert Bloch is currently being cut to pieces in the press for its grisly
true-crime tale of a psychosexual murderer. Psycho
presents something unexpected with the Hitchcock name, namely the master of
suspense presenting a horror film. It seems beneath Hitchcock to tackle such
sordid material, but the director is certain that critics and audiences will
see the magic of the Hitchcock hand as it transforms crap into greatness.

It also seems that Psycho
is Hitchcock’s most personal film yet.A
bit of a pervert himself—Hitchcock likes to peer through the blinds and leer at
all the beauties on the Paramount lot—Hitchcock sees something in this story of
a deranged voyeur that might bring his return to form. The stranger bits of Hitchcock feature the director
conversing with Ed Gein (played by Michael Moriarty) the true-life counterpart
of Psycho’s knife-wielding mamma’s
boy, Norman Bates. In these surreal scenes, Hitchcock explores his dark side
and all those strong urges he’s repressed over the years. A closeted ladies’
man, Hitchcock dreams of bedding the blondes that appear before his camera. The
urges erupt thanks to the prodding of Mr. Ed Gein, with Hitchcock nearly
knifing to shreds his leading lady Janet Leigh (played by a perfectly cast
Scarlett Johansson) during the filming of Psycho’s
pivotal “shower scene.”

Some of Hitch’s dirty doings add a nice little nuance to the
film. In one scene, Hitchcock removes a covering on the wall and peers into the
dressing of Vera Miles (Jessica Biel) just in time to see her unsnap her bra.
The same device appears in the final cut of Psycho,
as Norman Bates (James D’Arcy) enjoys a peephole to watch Marion Crane enter
the shower.

Hitchcock’s dark side also adds an unflattering slant to
this biopic—the necessary warts, if you will. For example, the screenplay by
John J. McLaughlin (one of the writers of Black
Swan) suggests that Hitchcock vindictively sandbagged Vera Miles and pulled
the plug on a woman he once wanted to make a star. Miles and Hitchcock have a
frosty relationship on the set of Psycho,
and Hopkins’ Hitchcock harbours a sense of betrayal against Miles, as she
cancelled her plans to work with the director on Vertigo because she became pregnant. The lack of affection that the
portly Mr. Hitchcock receives from statuesque beauties is part of the Norman
Bates complex that creates his psychology in the film.

However, Hitchcock is often equally cruel to Alma.
Constantly attune to her husband’s interest in his leading ladies (such as
ordering an extra pudding for Janet Leigh at dinner), Alma feels unappreciated
and unattractive. Hitchcock’s lack of affection for Alma is tangibly offensive,
since his wife enjoys the thankless role of devoting her life to furthering her
husband’s work. Hitchcock almost
gives more credit to Alma as an innovate filmmaker than to Hitchcock—it’s Alma
who suggests some key casting choices for Psycho,
as well as the radical idea of bumping off the A-list starlet after the first
thirty minutes—but the film also looks more at Alma’s own personal inclinations
than at her creativity. Much of the film centres on a tired love-triangle
between Hitch, Alma, and Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston), a screenwriter who
blatantly has an eye for Alma. Alma fails to reciprocate, until she tires of
the role of the long-suffering wife and decides to pursue her own work and make
Hitch jealous.

It’s interesting to see such an untold side of Alfred Hitchcock,
but it’s also a bit unnerving to see the dirty laundry of one of the cinema’s
greatest directors dragged out and hung to dry. The work that deservedly made
Hitchcock such a pillar of the cinema didn’t seem to suffer as a result of his
personal kinks either, so some die-hard fans of the director might not
appreciate how this biopic favours the salacious side of Hitchcock over than
the cinematic. It’s too bad that the film doesn’t show more of the filming of Psycho, since the behind the scenes
snippets of the film are much richer—and far more unique—than the conventional
story of the Svengali and the woman-behind-the-man. Much of the production of Psycho is underdeveloped in Hitchcock, such as the intriguing take
on Anthony Perkins, who appears only in a scene or two, or the tension between
Hitchcock and Miles, which illuminates Hitchcock’s hound-dog ego, but without
deviating from the exciting scenes of cinematic history.

What the film does show of the filming of Psycho, however, is often quite good.
Especially entertaining is the playful back-and-forth between Hitchcock and the
censors as he tries to cut the shower scene as delicately yet sensationally as
possible. It’s in scenes like these that best reveal the ingenuity of
Hitchcock’s great mind.

The great director himself is given a worthy homage in the
form of Anthony Hopkins’ lively performance. Under an impressive layer or latex
and a fake nose worthy of Cloud Atlas,
Hopkins is fat and jolly as Alfred Hitchcock. A mild-mannered, well-spoken
portly fellow, Hopkins plays Hitchcock as a nuanced film geek man-child. Like
the boys with a camera in Super 8,
Hitchcock still believes in the magic of movies and his passion lives on in
Hopkins’ commendable portrayal. Helen Mirren holds her own in the subtler, if
slightly more limited, role of Alma, and brings a worthy blend of dignity and
spark to elevate the character beyond the role of the wife. It’s a dynamic with
which Alma seems to have struggled, and Reville’s stamp on the legacy of Psycho is done justice through Mirren
and Hopkins’ layered take on the Hitchcock team.

Hopkins and Mirren are also much funnier than one expects
for a film about a horror film. Hitchcock
has an unexpectedly spot-on sense of comedic timing, which is used to a
sprightly effect in the final act of the film as Hitchcock bumbles around the
movie theatre during Psycho’sworld premiere awaiting the audience’s
reaction. The sequence is as suspenseful as the shower sequence itself. The
biggest joke of Hitchcock, however,
is how little faith much of Hollywood had in a film that turned out to be one
of the greatest of all time. Hitchcock and Alma mortgaged their house to pay
for Psycho themselves, and labored
over the film together until the final cut. Unlike Liz and Dick, Hitch and Alma
worked through their insecurities and perhaps used their differences to make Psycho a superior work. Liz & Dick might be a turkey, but Hitchcock certainly isn’t for the birds.

Rating: ★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Hitchcock is
currently playing in Ottawa at Empire Kanata and Empire World Exchange.